If you've ever worked in customer support, you've probably heard this slogan a thousand times. But there is much more to being a successful customer representative than just that.

Desk.com shares five things you should know if you're entering this field.

1. Take time to investigate customer issues.

Your job as a support agent is to find solutions to customer issues. This can range from educating your customer on how to use your product, to coming up with workarounds and escalating bugs to other teams. To do this well, you need to understand your product from the inside out and understand your customer's goals. This means taking time to investigate customer issues and familiarizing yourself with the product.

2. Address the issue, not just the question.

Sometimes customers don't ask the right questions. As a support agent, you should look past their questions and find solutions to their issues. Try asking, "Can you please provide a little more detail on the issue you're trying to resolve?" If you don't know the entire issue, you could lead your customers down the wrong path and create more frustration for them and more work for yourself.

3. Prepare to answer the same question over and over again.

Keep in mind that you might respond to one customer's question and get the same question from another customer a minute later. It may be frustrating at first, because you feel like you're repeating yourself, but you have to treat each customer like a new one. You have to start from the beginning: Describe each feature and function the customer will use so that they fully understand your solution. This will reduce the back-and-forth.

4. Compartmentalize.

As much as you try to avoid it, you will inevitably run into a negative encounter with a customer, since you're their first point of contact. It's important to stay calm, help the customer, and, most important, not take that negative energy to the next customer. You have to go into every conversation with a clear head, or else you'll make the conversation more negative than it needs to be. This goes back to the third point: Every customer is different, and you need to treat them as such.

5. Share your insights with the rest of the company.

As a support agent, you have knowledge that every team in the company can benefit from. Every day that you talk to customers, you gain insight into what goals they're trying to accomplish with your product and how successful they are at reaching those goals. You experience the growing pains with the customer day in and day out.

If you share your knowledge, the marketing team can get a better understanding of what the market looks like, and your product team can identify the problems they need to solve. Understanding your customers will help the entire company.

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